I like the smell of Swift in the morning…

I currently work on a project where we use Apple’s User Notifications (formerly known as Push Notifications) to deliver chat messages to our users. Whenever the user is not in the chat screen we want to show the Notification using the standard system banner on top of the screen.

Per default when a User Notification is received while the app runs in the foreground the notification is not shown to the user. With the arrival of Apple’s iOS10 UserNotifications framework you can easily decide whether to show the received Notification or not. When a Notification is delivered to a foreground app the UNUserNotificationCenterDelegate method userNotificationCenter(_:willPresent:withCompletionHandler:) is called. By calling this method’s completionHandler you tell the system if and how it should show the Notification to the user:

func userNotificationCenter(_ center: UNUserNotificationCenter, willPresent notification: UNNotification, withCompletionHandler completionHandler: @escaping (UNNotificationPresentationOptions) -> Void) {
// do your stuff
// this tells the system NOT to show the notification to the user
completionHandler()
}

If you want to show the notification you can add a set of UNNotificationPresentationOptions to the completion handler:

Sometimes you offer your users the ability to make a phone call directly from your app. For example there could be a “Call Help Center” button that a user can press to make the call. When the user taps on that button the system will prompt a dialog where the user can either cancel or make the call.

When you write a UITest for this button you want to test that tapping the button will initiate the call. But you don’t actually want to make the call. So you need a way to cancel the call when the dialog shows up.

Normally you would add a UIInterruptionMonitor at the beginning of the UITest. This works for a lot of system dialogs (e.g. the dialog that asks the user for permission to use his location). But in this case it does not work. The UIInterruptionMonitor’s closure is never executed.

The reason is quite simple. UIInterruptionMonitor only works with dialogs that are presented by your app. All the permission dialogs are presented within your app’s scope, so the UIInterruptionMonitor can handle them. The phone call dialog however is presented from outside your app’s scope. You need to access the dialog via the Springboard which is now possible with Xcode 9.

When writing a Calabash test for a new feature I encountered the following challenge: During the test a SFSafariViewController is presented and has to be dismissed again. For security reasons the user’s activity and interaction with SFSafariViewController are not visible to the app. In other words: Calabash cannot access the SFSafariViewController’s UI elements via query.

So you cannot query the ‘Done’ button like this:

def doneButton
"view:'_UIModernBarButton' marked:'Done'"
end

Because SFSafariViewController’s ‘Done’ Button is not accessible for the app, Calabash cannot see it and the test fails.

Calabash added a DeviceAgent for that case. The DeviceAgent can detect views that are outside of your own app or views that are presented by the OS (like SFSafariViewController or MFMailComposeViewController).

So to tap the SFSafariViewController’s ‘Done’ button and dismiss it you can do this:

Then(/^I close Safari/) do
device_agent.touch(type: 'Button', marked: 'Done')
end

You can also use this to dismiss an Email Compose View Controller (Although there you have to touch the ‘Cancel’ button).

Just be aware that you should use the DeviceAgent when you really have to, because Calabash’s query engine is faster and can find more views than the DeviceAgent.

I recently worked on an app for a big retailer that made intensive use of remote notifications (aka push notifications). One use case: Whenever you use the app to pay for your shopping you will receive a remote notification when the payment was successful. Tapping on the remote notification would launch the app and show the receipt for the transaction.

As I used a lot of Xcode UITests on this project I was wandering if it is possible to test the remote notification handling in an UITest. It turns out that it is possible. There are two things that need to happen during the test:

1. Trigger a mock remote notification
2. Tap on the remote notification when it is received

Triggering a remote notification is relative easy thanks to the work of the fine folks at noodlework. They build a framework to play around with the Apple Push Notification service (APNs). Using their framework (NWPusher) makes it possible to trigger a remote notification right from a UITest class.

There is one new feature that comes to the XCUITest framework with Xcode 9: Multi App Testing. It is now possible to interact with other apps (and the Springboard) when running a UITest 🎉. So with Xcode 9 we can wait for the remote notification to appear and tap on it. Yay!

So, let’s do it.

Set up a dummy application (if needed)

I’m assuming that you already have an app that uses remote notifications. Otherwise just setup a simple app like I did. My app has a main view controller (with a gray background) and three child view controllers with different background colors that are presented modally based on the remote notification that was received:

My remote notification’s payload contains a key vcType that can have three values red, blue or green. When you tap on the remote notification the app looks for that key to determine which view controller to present.

This is the remote notification payload that makes the app present a red view controller:

{
"aps" : { "alert" : "Hello Red" },
"vcType" : "red"
}

If you are setting up a new app for this remember to activate the PushNotification capabilities in your target.

Trigger a remote notification in a UITest

1. Install NWPusher
Add NWPusher to the UITest target of your app. I use Carthage to do that but you can also use CocoaPods or add their source files directly to your app.

2. Add push notification certificate to your app
To trigger a remote notification you need to add a valid Apple Push Notification service SSL certificate to the UITest target of your app.

There is a detailed description on how to do this in the NWPusher repo, so I keep it short here:
– Create a Development APN Certificate on the Apple developer center (if you do not already have created one).
– Download the certificate and add it to your Keychain
– Export the certificate to a PKCS12 file. Set a password (and remember it ;-))
– Add the p12 file to the UITest target.

Now you are ready to trigger a Remote Notification right from your UITest’s code.

3. Trigger a remote notification from a UITest
I created a helper function to trigger a remote notification because I want to trigger multiple notifications:

The code loads the certificate file into a Data object, connects to NWPusher’s service and triggers the remote notification.

You might have noticed that this function expects a deviceToken that is needed for the NWPusher service. That is a bit of a problem, because the deviceToken changes everytime you install the app or run the test on a different device.

To get around this I use a dirty hack. I do not really like this but I could not think of another way to make the deviceToken available to the UITest. If you have a better idea, please let me know in the comments!

To make the deviceToken accessible to the UITest I add a launch argument “isRunningUITests” when launching the app from a UITest. The app checks if the launch argument is present and if it is, adds a tiny UILabel to its root view controller and sets the label’s text to the device token. The UITest class then can read the deviceToken from that label. Shudder. Really ugly, I know.

The alternative would be to manually set the deviceToken when running the UITests. Not an option.

So now we can trigger a remote notification from a UITest class. Neat!

One more thing: When you run the app for the first time a system dialog will pop up to ask the user’s permission to send remote notifications. This also happens during a UITest, so we have to dismiss this dialog during the test.

The tap on the XCUIApplication seems a bit strange but you have to interact with the app after setting up the interruption monitor to make it work.

Write the UITest that tests the 3 different remote notifications

Now we can write a UITest that does the following steps:

1. Hold a reference to the app and the springboard
2. Get the deviceToken from the app
3. Close the app
4. Trigger a “red” remote notification
5. Tap on the notification
6. Assert that the red view controller is shown
7. Close the app
8. Trigger a “green” remote notification
9. Tap on the notification
10. Assert that the green view controller is shown
11. Close the app
12. Trigger a “blue” remote notification
13. Tap on the notification
14. Assert that the blue view controller is shown

I added sleep statements after closing the to make sure that the app is fully in background mode before triggering the remote notifications.

Now we can run the test and Voila! UITests that test the handling of remote notifications! Just don’t try to run the tests in a Simulator as remote notifications only work on real devices.

You can checkout the demo app including the UITest here. Make sure to add the demo app as your own app to your developer account and to import your own APN development certificate (the p12 file) to the project to make it work.

When your are writing UITests for a multi language app you need access to your Localizable.strings. For example when you need to press a “Save” Button in your test. Because your app is localized the text “Save” is part of your Localizable.strings file.

You can use any class from your UITests to access the UITest bundle. When you are not explicitly asking to use the UITest bundle when initializing the NSLocalizedString the default value Bundle.main will be used. Using Bundle.main does not work when running UITests because it gives you the bundle of the UITest Runner App instead of the UITest bundle.

A simple scenario: You are writing a UITest that should check if a UISwitch is switched on.

In a UnitTest you would simply do this:

XCTAssert(yourSwitch.isOn)

When you are running a UITest you cannot do that, because during a running UITest you cannot access the UISwitch directly. Xcode only gives you access to your app’s UI elements via the XCUIElement class. That class is used for all accessible UI elements so it does not have a isOn property like UISwitch has.

So how do you test that the UISwitch is on?

It’s actually pretty easy, but not really obvious. XCUIElement conforms to XCUIElementAttributes which gives you access to a value property of type Any?

So, as value can literally be Any(thing) I tried to cast it to a Bool, because isOn also is a Bool, right?

Not working! Turns out that when you access a UISwitch in your UITest its value property is of type NSTaggedPointerString. Which is a subclass of NSString and can be cast to String (when you are using Swift). So the BoolisOn value has been mapped to a “0” or “1” String.

To test if the first UISwitch in your current view has been switched on, you can do this in a UITest:

Now for something a bit off-topic. As a side project I handle a friend’s company’s website. He asked me to add a button that links to his facebook page and another button that opens the review form for his company’s google page.

In an older blog post I described how to simulate a custom location in the Simulator by using a GPX file. During my current project I have to use simulated locations a lot. But every time I ran my app in the simulator Xcode deactivated the location simulation. So I had to manually select it again with every start of the app. Really annoying.

As it turns out there is way to permanently enable location simulation in the Simulator. It’s just a bit hidden. To always enable location simulation open Edit Scheme for the scheme you are running and then under Run > Options select one of the available locations as Default Location because otherwise the default is None and no location is simulated.

Voilá, once you select a default location for your scheme the Simulator keeps simulating the location everytime you start it.

Who doesn’t love the “Swipe Back” gesture to navigate back to the previous view controller? I rarely use the back button in the left upper corner of the screen anymore. Especially when you are holding your phone in one hand it is much more easy to just swipe back.

The best thing is that as a developer you don’t have to do anything to enable this swipe back functionality as it already part of UINavigationController.

On initialization UINavigationController installs a UIScreenEdgePanGestureRecognizer on its view to handle the interactive pop gesture (aka “Swipe Back” gesture). You can access the gesture recognizer via the interactivePopGestureRecognizer property.

Now, when you decide to replace the default back button with your own custom back button you will see that the “Swipe Back” Gesture is not working anymore. Apparently the UIScreenEdgePanGestureRecognizer’s delegate only allows the gesture to be recognized when it sees that the default back button is being used. Bummer!

To make the “Swipe Back” work again you have to bypass the delegate that disables the gesture. If found some suggestions that would simply set the delegate to nil. This seems to work at first. But when you start playing around with your app after doing that you will eventually see that the app freezes and does not recognize ANY touches anymore. This happens when you swipe back while the navigation controller is pushing a view controller. Not good!

So you have to set the delegate yourself and implement gestureRecognizerShouldBegin(_:) to disable the gesture whenever the navigation controller is pushing a view controller.

To block the “Swipe Back” gesture there is a boolean property isPushingViewController that is true when the navigation controller is pushing a view controller. [// 1]

Setting the property to true is easy. We simply override pushViewController(_:animated:) and set isPushingViewController to true [// 2]

To be able to set it back to false when the view controller has been pushed we have to know when the push is completed. Luckily there is a UINavigationControllerDelegate method that we can use. So we set our UINavigationController subclass’ delegate to self [// 3] and implement navigationController(_:didShowViewController:animated:) to set isPushingViewController back to false [// 4]

Now all that is left is to also set the interactivePopGestureRecognizer‘s delegate to self [// 5] and to only allow the gesture when isPushingViewController is false. And while we are at it we also make sure that the swipe back makes sense. In other words we check if the navigation controller has more than one view controller on his stack. Otherwise we ignore the gesture. [// 6]

Yay, “Swipe Back” is back!

But wait a minute. What happens when someone is using this UINavigationController subclass and needs to set the delegate themselves:

// 1: We use the didSet property observer on the delegate property. Whenever the delegate is being set we check if our subclass itself is the delegate (we don’t do anything so the subclass will be set as its own delegate). If the delegate is of any other class we do not set it as delegate but keep a reference to it.

// 2: We implement the UINavigationControllerDelegate method that we use to see when the pushing is completing. In this method we set isPushingViewController back to false. We also forward the call to our external delegate.

Unfortunately we have to forward ALL methods that are defined in UINavigationControllerDelegate to out external delegate to make the external delegate fully functional. This is not an ideal solution. When Apple decides to add methods to UINavigationControllerDelegate in the future they will have to added here. Or they won’t be called when setting the delegate manually. In Objective-C you could use the NSInvocation API to handle this, but that API is not available in Swift. I have not found a way to forward all delegate methods to the external delegate in Swift. I you know a way to do this, please leave a comment!

And so, with a little bit of work, we can use the Interactive Pop Gesture (aka “Swipe Back”) even when we are not using the system default back button.

For my current project I use BuddyBuild for Continuous Integration and Delivery which work remarkably well. Until suddenly the builds started to fail in spite of all unit tests being green and everything building without problems locally on my machine.

It took me a while to fix the problem and I am still not 100% sure what the problem was but here is what I did. Normally I would not write a post about stuff I don’t fully understand, but because I could not find anything helpful on Google or StackOverflow about this problem I decided to write a post anyway. Maybe it can point someone with a similar problem into the right direction.

So here is what I did:

Looking at BuddyBuild’s logs I found the error message that was causing the build to fail:

Because this error was not occurring when I built the project locally on my machine I had to find out what the difference was when BuddyBuild was building the project.

As it turned out the Swift compiler was only crashing when building the project with the Release Configuration.

So I could reproduce the crash in Xcode when I build the project with the Release configuration. So far so good. But the problem was, that the error message that Xcode provided when the compiler chrashed was a lot less helpful than the error message provided by BuddyBuild’s log. It basically just tells you that it crashed without telling you where and why. Not good enough to find the problem and fix it.

I was able to get the above error message on my machine so I could start to find out what the problem was.

So I knew which class was causing the problem but I still had to find what was making the compiler crash. I wish I could tell you a really elegant and clever way how I found the problem but to be honest I had to play the old “comment out all the new stuff and then bring it back line by line until the compiler breaks” game.

So I finally found the code snippet that was the cause of the compiler crash:

Apparently using flatMap and directly passing a function as parameter was a bit too much for the LLVM compiler in this case. Which is strange because I do exactly the same in many other parts of the project without any problems. But when I switched to using a closure in this case the compiler crash was gone and everything was building again.

As I already wrote at the beginning of this post I don’t really know what caused the problem. I just managed to fix it somehow. So if any of you has an idea what made the compiler crash I would really appreciate your explanation in the comments.